Queer Identities/Political Realities examines the intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and sexual identity with particular emphasis on the negotiation of meaning between public behavior and private behavior in the United States. Centering on cases that illuminate key issues, each chapter questions assumptions about media coverage and extends current theoretical understanding. Each chapter focuses on a specific case within the broader conceptual fabric of queer theory, media theory, or rhetorical criticism. Varied methodological approaches allow us to gauge public discourse of multifaceted controversies that involve same sex behavior. History reveals frequent occasions when private sexual behaviors surface to attract public interest. While the prejudices and discrimination against same-sex partnerships, whether casual or permanent, remain entrenched in United States culture, there have been occasions when the public discussion is riveted on instances. This book argues that public interest changes when the partners in such relationships are of the same sex. The extraordinary public prejudice against same sex unions and public censure has been well documented in other research reports and continues to receive attention in other scholarly publications. This book will examine the unique intersection of political leadership, media coverage, and same-sex behavior.

McRuer makes a case that queer and disabled identities, politics, and cultural logics are inexorably intertwined, and that queer and disability theory need one another. Crip theory makes clear that no cultural analysis is complete without attention to the politics of bodily ability and 'alternative corporealities'.

This Major Reference series brings together a wide range of key international articles in law and legal theory. Many of these essays are not readily accessible, and their presentation in these volumes will provide a vital new resource for both research and teaching. Each volume is edited by leading international authorities who explain the significance and context of articles in an informative and complete introduction.

In this collection, political and public policy analysts explore the social concerns of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered--what has come to be known as "lgbt" or "queer" politics. Compared to the humanities and to other social sciences, political science has been slow to address this phenomenon. Issues ranging from housing to adoption to laws on sodomy, however, have increasingly raised important political questions about the rights and status of sexual minorities, particularly within liberal democracies such as the United States, and also on an international level. This anthology offers the first comprehensive overview of the study of lgbt politics in political science across the discipline's main subfields and methodologies, and it spotlights lgbt movements in several regions around the world. Focusing on the politics of sexuality with regard to the politics of knowledge, the book presents a discussion of power that will interest all political scientists and others concerned with minority rights and gender as well as with transformation in the relations between public and private. The articles cover such topics as lgbt power in urban politics, the impact of public opinion on lgbt life, means of effecting legal and political change in the United States, and international differences in lgbt political activism. The authors represent a new cadre of political scientists who are creating an interdisciplinary domain of research that is informed by and in turn generates political activism. They are Dennis Altman, M. V. Lee Badgett, Robert W. Bailey, Mark Blasius, Cathy J. Cohen, Timothy E. Cook, Paisley Currah, Juanita Díaz-Cotto, Jan-Willem Duyvendak, Leonard Harris, Bevin Hartnett, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, David Rayside, Rebecca Mae Salokar, and Alan S. Yang.

'Another Country' expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond the city limits, investigating the lives of rural queers across the United States, from faeries in the Midwest to lesbian separatist communes on the coast of Northern California.

This book examines queer visibility in reality television, which is arguably the most prolific space of gay, lesbian, transgender and otherwise queer media representation. It explores almost two decades of reality programming, from Big Brother to I Am Cait, American Idol to RuPaul’s Drag Race, arguing that the specific conventions of reality TV—its intimacy and emotion, its investments in celebrity and the ideal of authenticity—have inextricably shaped the ways in which queer people have become visible in reality shows. By challenging popular judgements on reality shows as damaging spaces of queer representation, this book argues that reality TV has pioneered a unique form of queer-inclusive broadcasting, where a desire for authenticity, rather than being heterosexual, is the norm. Across all chapters, this book investigates how reality TV’s celebration of ‘compulsory authenticity’ has circulated ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ ways of being queer, demonstrating how possibilities for queer visibility are shaped by broader anxieties and around selfhood, identity and the real in contemporary cultural life.

"This book puts International Relations scholarship and Queer Studies scholarship in conversation to tell a story about how sovereignty and sexuality are entangled in international relations theory and policy through numerous figurations of 'the homosexual' - as 'the underdeveloped', 'the un-developable', 'the unwanted im/migrant', 'the terrorist', 'the gay rights holder', 'the gay patriot' and Eurovision-winner Conchita Wurst's 'bearded lady'"--